Saturday, 25 July 2009

Speedometer - measuring network interface load

On my quest to find the more unusual or interesting network monitoring tools I stumbled upon speedometer. Speedometer is a useful text based network throughput meter - it provides a scrolling load graph and annotates throughput peaks:

To install, use:

sudo apt-get install speedometer

and run by specifying the rx and/or tx network interface:

speedometer -rx wlan0 -tx wlan0

One can also use it to monitor the rate of a running download. For example, suppose I'm downloading a Ubuntu ISO using firefox, one can monitor the download speed using:

speedometer -f Desktop/ubuntu-9.04-desktop-i386.iso.part

The ability to measure the rate that a file is being written to means one can use speedometer to measure the write speed on a filesystem using:

dd if=/dev/zero of=test.dat bs=1M count=4096 &speedometer -f test.dat

Specifying multiple network interfaces will draw the network activity in graphs stacked one on top of another. However, one can stack the graphs in columns by using the -c flag:

speedometer -rx wlan0 -c -rx wlan0

If you don't like the fancy graphs, a simple text mode output can be selected using the -t flag, as illustrated below: